You can craft exotic gear, buy it off the AH, run dungeons for tokens or farm karma for exotic gear.

Can go anywhere in the world to farm karma. Doing the daily & monthly are great sources of karma. Also map completing the 3 Orr zones will give a free exotic gear piece. Which you can use or sell/trade for a more agreeable piece.

Try to get 100% world map completion. I did it and it's quite satisfying, not to mention the gold you'd make from the orange armour rewards for completing the higher level zones (or just keep s your own).

Who knows more of gods than I? Horse gods and fire gods, gods made of gold with gemstone eyes, gods carved of cedar wood, gods chiseled into mountains, gods of empty air... I know them all.
~Euron "Crow's Eye" Greyjoy

With my first toon I got cheap lvl80 Masterwork gear and then worked towards Exotics. With masterwork gear I could run dungeons and do WvW without feeling that I was not contributing to group. Hardest part was to plan what kind of gear I wanted (full berzerker or something with conditions or somethign else...). Karma comes fast from WvW and Orr. Dungeons give good money (AC is easy money, COF and Arah path2 are also good but harder).

If you continue to play solo you don't really need to worry about gear as long as you feel that you are not dying too much and things die at some point when you hit them. Don't stress about gear and ruin the game by starting to focus mainly gearing. Nobody cares if you do not have exotic gear on WvW, but dungeon pug groups may whine if you wear lvl60 items as lvl80.

Guild groups allowed me to get good money & gear for my ele (luckily she needed AC gear and people are running that several times a day for money). Those runs gave me enough money to get gear for my alts (last time I checked exotic berserker items on TP were ~4-5g, when fine items with same start collection were ~10s and Masterwork even less, stat difference is not that big). As you can see I am not even talking about Acended gear, I personally haven't started to run fractals to get them. I have too much other things to do in game.

With my first toon I got cheap lvl80 Masterwork gear and then worked towards Exotics. With masterwork gear I could run dungeons and do WvW without feeling that I was not contributing to group. Hardest part was to plan what kind of gear I wanted (full berzerker or something with conditions or somethign else...). Karma comes fast from WvW and Orr. Dungeons give good money (AC is easy money, COF and Arah path2 are also good but harder).

As a condition necro, I got my not-MF gear from HotW. All three paths are easy, with the only rough part being Andal the Vandal, and path 1 takes maybe 10 minutes to finish, depending on how much trash you skip.

If you are particularly bold, you could use a Shiny Ditto. Do keep in mind though, this will infuriate your opponents due to Ditto's beauty. Please do not use Shiny Ditto. You have been warned.

The best way to get exotic gear, definetely is by playing dungeons. You get gear from them and get rewarded with gold at the same time. If you plan to do it, you should probably craft level 80 rares with which you can play dungeons normally.
PS:Crafting exotic level 80 items is a waste.

Not really. It's the easiest way to control your stats and not depend on other players for dungeon runs.
Since the OP seems to be a loner, I'm not sure how comfortable he would be taking the dungeon plunge with random people.

I leveled with Artificing and Tailoring. Enabled me to craft everything I need except a weapon. Got my character full exotic in about a week or two.